Category: Guest Blog

While Laura Cipullo and the Laura Cipullo Whole Nutrition Team work on some new and exciting projects, you may notice less posts on the Eating and Living Moderately Blog. We have created a “blog shelf” below to keep you entertained and educated. Get caught up on the latest nutrition education by clicking on each year below. We will send you nutrition updates, but we will not be inundating your mailboxes on a weekly basis. If you want weekly “love” and inspiration, subscribe to our Mom Dishes It Out blog for weekly posts and recipes. Mom Dishes It Out provides expert advice from mom Registered Dietitians and mom Speech Pathologists on the “how to” of health promotion!

The EALM Blog Shelf

Please feel free to peruse our posts organized by year below. Or take a look at the categories listed at the bottom of the page to find a post in the desired.

In the springtime, a mother asked me, “How do I teach my child about food waste and hunger without worrying or shaming her?” Well, I didn’t have the answer, but I now have a way to at least start the conversation. In honor of Hunger Action Month, read on to learn about nutrition student and Rescuing Leftover Cuisine volunteer Hannah Husby’s recommendations to turn extra food into meals for others. –Laura Cipullo, RD, CDE, CEDRD and Mom

Ideas for Food RescueHannah Husby, Nutrition Student, NYU While we worry a lot these days about all the food we are eating, we should consider turning our positive attention to food we may be wasting. Of course, everyone wastes food from time to time; it’s easy to want to buy all the beautiful produce at the farmer’s market, only to find you bought too many peaches—and the last two became rotten before you could eat them! (For tips on how to avoid this, see this post.) This waste tends to be more annoying than anything for us, but for those that face issues with food insecurity, having that peach before it gets soft could make a difference between going to bed hungry or not. Short of eating everything in your fridge right now so none of it goes to waste, what can be done to help? It actually takes a surprisingly small amount of time to make a difference. Big cities across the country can use help feeding their homeless and secure food, and this can make an incredible impact. Here are a few places to check out in New York City:

City Harvest – Known for everything from food rescue to nutrition education, City Harvest has served New York for over thirty years and continues to eliminate food waste every day.

Rescuing Leftover Cuisine – A smaller and recently created non-profit, Rescuing Leftover Cuisine also aims to feed the hungry by taking donations from restaurants and businesses, no matter how small, and can always use volunteers to transport this food directly to shelters and pantries.

Food rescues can also be found all over the country by checking out Feeding America, but if there are no rescues in your community, you can actually create your own with the help of City Harvest! Volunteering, even just an hour or two a week, can do wonders not only for the community you live in, but also for yourself, connecting you more with those around you and creating a fresh perspective on those day-to-day complaints we all face. And it certainly helps you appreciate how wonderfully delicious those peaches are!

Walking through a hall of chiseled, marble statues in various athletic positions can make you wonder who that discus thrower’s trainer was and if his 450 BC workout is still available. This renaissance Photoshop, and very real Photoshop of the 2014 Sochi Athletes, may even elicit a google search for an “Olympic fitness routine.” But before you embark on your new training, consider this; “Olympian” is not a workout regiment—it’s a career.

If you have a job, go to school, are a full-time parent, or do all of the above, you already understand what kind of intense commitment goes into your profession. Being an Olympic Athlete isn’t just doing the workout, it’s doing the work. Let’s deconstruct this idea by taking a closer look at the United States ice dancing gold-medalists, Meryl Davis and Charlie White.

Davis, 27, and White, 26, have been ice dancing together for 17 years, training roughly 1.5-2 hours everyday—when they were young teens. These part-time students at The University of Michigan are now full-time Olympic Athletes. Davis and White are on the ice every Monday through Friday starting at 7am at the International Skating Academy in Canton, Michigan. They typically go through techniques, watch old performance tape, and develop new routines on and off the ice. They stay in their skates for about 6 hours. After work, they hit the gym.

A typical after work-workout consists of cardio, three days a week, and then strength training. They do agility, balance, and weight training and, on occasion, ballet. While it is not their favorite, it is essential to help with their balance practice. White often steadies a kettle bell on his shoulders during ballet practice in preparation for the lifts and carries during their skating routines. Davis and White enjoy their weekends off.

Despite the more offbeat nature of their professional life, their workday is very similar to your average adult. The main different is that their body is their office. It’s where they spend their business days and where they put in overtime; it’s their trade and their skill and it’s what pays their bills.

Training like an Olympic Athlete is taking on an entirely new profession; one where the most skilled are constantly subjected to injury. During the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, over 11% of the athletes injured themselves. More than half of those injuries occurred during training. These figures do not even include the athletes who were injured prior to the Games. Canadian ice-dancer Tessa Virtue famously skated through compartment syndrome in both her legs during the 2010 Games and went on to endure two painful surgeries and over a year of recovery. She and her partner, Scott Moir, withdrew from a series of 2012 competitions due to a faulty landing on Moir’s neck. Luckily, they were able to compete in the 2014 Games and took home the silver medal.

The very same attention and devotion you put into your work, they put into theirs. So, in a way, we are all Olympians in our field! You would never ask an athlete—or more importantly, any untrained individual—to take over your job. Maybe, from now on, we can just meet Davis and White at the gym when we all get off work.

You want to be healthy in the mind as well as the body, right? So do you think a gym is a place of healthy attitudes and positive role models? Unfortunately, it’s not always the best place for our mind or bodies especially when we are moving for the wrong reasons. Many times, I encourage my clients to move but fear they will get caught up in over-working their bodies, or triggered when their trainer or instructor give unsolicited diet advice or encourages more than one spin class a day. Well my colleague had the brilliant idea to create a training program to educate fitness specialists/trainers at the gym how to work with health seekers in a way that honors both the mind and body. This amazing training helps the gym employees to identify individuals with eating disorders and gives them tools to work with clients in a healthy way rather than encouraging the disorder. Read on to learn about Jodi’s Destructively Fit and perhaps think about whether or not your health club needs a little bit of Jodi’s energy.

By Guest Blogger, Jodi Rubin

Eating disorders have always been my passion. They have been my specialty since I began my LCSW private practice more than a decade ago. Over the years, I’ve directed a program for eating disorders, currently teach a curriculum I created on eating disorders at NYU’s Graduate School of Social Work, and have done a few other things. Yet, I have not found a way to connect my love of healthy fitness and honoring one’s body with my passion for helping those struggling with eating disorders.

The issue of eating disorders within fitness centers is a ubiquitous one. I’ve seen people spending hours on the treadmill, heard countless patients recounting their obsessiveness with the gym, and others seeming as though their self-esteem became immediately deflated if they couldn’t work out hard enough, fast enough or long enough. The research I have done has revealed that the presence of eating disorders within fitness centers is “sticky” and “complicated” and gets very little attention. Through no fault of anyone in particular, if people aren’t given the education and tools, then how can anyone feel knowledgable and confident enough to address this sensitive issue?

I went directly to fitness professionals to see what they thought about eating disorders within the fitness industry. As I suspected, it was clear that there was not a lack of interest in this issue. Quite the contrary. Most, if not all, of those with whom I spoke were eager and excited to finally have a forum in which they could learn about eating disorders and how to approach the issue. That’s when DESTRUCTIVELY FIT™: demystifying eating disorders for fitness professionals™ was born. I created this 3-hour training with the goal of educating those within the fitness industry about what eating disorders are and what to do if they notice that someone may be struggling. It has since been endorsed for continuing education by both the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) and The American Council on Exercise (ACE) and has sparked the interest of variety of fitness clubs. Check out Destructively Fit™ in the news here!

Some stats for you…
• 25 million American women are struggling with eating disorders
• 7 million American men are struggling with eating disorders
• 81% of 10 year old girls are afraid of being fat
• 51% of 9-10 year old girls feel better about themselves when they are dieting
• 45% of boys are unhappy with their bodies
• 67% of women 15-64 withdraw from life-engaging activities, like giving an opinion and going to the doctor, because they feel badly about their looks
• An estimated 90-95% of those diagnosed with eating disorders are members of fitness centers

Read more about Destructively Fit™ on destructivelyfit.com. You can also follow Destructively Fit™ on Facebook and Twitter. Help spread the word and be a part of affecting change!

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